Benghazi E-Mails Put White House on the Defensive

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Jay Carney, the press secretary, said Friday at a briefing that the White House changed only a word or two in the talking points on the attack in Libya in September.CreditCreditWin Mcnamee/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — A long-simmering dispute over the White House’s account of the deadly assault on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, flared up on Friday, with a disclosure of e-mails that show the White House was more deeply involved in revising talking points about the attack than officials have previously acknowledged.

The e-mails, which the administration turned over to Congress, show the White House coordinating an intensive process with the State Department, the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other agencies to obtain the final version of the talking points, used by Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, in television appearances after the attack.

The State Department, in particular, pushed to remove references to Al Qaeda and Ansar al-Sharia, the Libyan militant group suspected of carrying out the attack as well as warnings about other potential terrorist threats from the C.I.A., which drafted the initial talking points.

Ms. Rice was later harshly criticized as having misled the public about the nature of the attack in her television appearances. For Republicans and other critics, the talking points have become a potent symbol of the Obama administration’s mishandling of the incident, even if they constitute only a part of the broader issues, from embassy security to intelligence gathering, that were raised by the attack.

The e-mails — initially disclosed in a report last month by House Republicans that was expanded on by The Weekly Standard, the conservative magazine, and on Friday in further detail by ABC News — had the White House scrambling to provide an explanation.

Early in the afternoon, it summoned reporters for a briefing by legal and political advisers who, under the ground rules, could not be identified. In that session, the White House asserted that the talking points were not modified for political reasons and noted that they had originally been prepared at the request of Congress. They said frequent, even exhaustive revision of talking points was routine at the White House.

Officials stuck to their contention that the only wording change the White House made was to change the description of the Benghazi annex from a consulate to a diplomatic post. Indeed, the e-mails do not reveal major new details about the attack or other discrepancies in the administration’s evolving account of it.

But when the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, arrived for his on-camera briefing later in the day, he was questioned repeatedly on whether he or the administration deliberately misled reporters last fall about the changes in the talking points.

Mr. Carney expressed no regrets and asserted that the C.I.A. rewrote the talking points, although the e-mails made clear that happened only after other agencies, including the State Department, weighed in.

“I do stand by that,” Mr. Carney said of his statement that the White House changed only a word or two to make clear the diplomatic post in Benghazi was not referred to as a consulate. “White House involvement in the talking points was very limited and nonsubstantive.”

But in at least one briefing last fall, Mr. Carney said both the White House and the State Department collectively made just one change, in contradiction to the e-mails that show much more substantive revisions proposed by the State Department.

“The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two, of these two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility,’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate,” Mr. Carney said on Nov. 28.

Mr. Carney said the reason changes were made was to make sure the talking points did not go further than what was definitively known at the time. He accused the Republicans of waging a partisan attack on the White House. “There’s an ongoing effort to make something political out of this,” he said.

The disclosures about how extensively the talking points were revised also reveal the divisions that often exist among intelligence agencies, as well as the bureaucratic infighting that often lies behind the bland language in official government statements.

In this case, the State Department bridled at the C.I.A.’s initial draft, both because it went further than what the department had been disclosing publicly and because it was apparently worried that C.I.A. warnings about other potential threats would reflect badly on the department.

The C.I.A.’s first draft of the talking points in the Sept. 11 attack was e-mailed to a group of senior officials at several federal agencies shortly before 7 p.m. on Sept. 14, according to several officials.

About 45 minutes later, the State Department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, raised concerns with the White House and the intelligence agencies, saying the information could be “abused” by members of Congress “to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?”

C.I.A. officials responded with a new draft, but Ms. Nuland replied that the changes did not “resolve all my issues or those of my building leadership.” A State Department official said Ms. Nuland was expressing concerns that the C.I.A.’s first versions of talking points, intended to be made available to lawmakers, were more explicit than what she had been allowed to tell reporters. She also believed that the C.I.A., which had more than 20 people in Benghazi on the night of the attack, was trying to absolve itself at the State Department’s expense before any investigation was completed by suggesting that repeated C.I.A. warnings about the security situation in the city were being ignored, this official said.

Ms. Nuland, a 29-year Foreign Service veteran who has served under Democratic and Republican secretaries of state and was once an ambassador and a senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, was not involved in the discussions after Sept. 14. “She did not change the drafts, she did not edit them,” the official said.

The major changes in the talking points came after a White House meeting on Sept. 15, the day before Ms. Rice used them in her appearance on five Sunday news shows, but a former official said that the State Department was not aware during the drafting process that she would be using them for her TV appearances.

Peter Baker and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

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